Detecting Tabletop Objects

Submitted by admin on Fri, 09/11/2009 - 14:43

Marius Muja of University of British Columbia began his internship in the middle of Milestone 2 excitement. For several weeks, he worked on two important perception components: detecting outlets from far away, and detecting door handles.

Thereafter, Marius focused on tabletop object detection and wrote the tabletop_objects package. Determining the exact position and orientation of an object, as well as its identity, is very important if a robot is grasping objects, and especially crucial if the object in question is fragile. Tabletop_objects uses a two-stage approach. In the bottom-up stage, initial estimations of possible object locations are made, and in the top-down stage, 3D models are fit into the estimated locations. After fitting the correct 3D model, the object's identity, position and orientation can be determined with high confidence. This approach can even distinguish between similar-looking drinking glasses. Marius worked with Ioan Sucan to integrate tabletop_objects and motion planning (move_arm), and together, they were able to successfully detect, grasp and manipulate fragile glass objects.

In addition to his work with tabletop_objects, Marius integrated FLANN (Fast Library for Nearest Neighbors) into OpenCV, and developed a phone-based teleoperation mode for PR2 based on Asterisk, an open source PBX.

Here are Marius's end-of-summer slides, where you can find more details about his work.